And, as for privacy in cyberspace? Fuggedaboutit. Especially politicians. In that space no one really cares to hear you scream WTF when naive cyber behavior and recklessly intimate communiquà ©s quickly become fodder for the world's entertainment, enemies' delectation, and an actor's personal, very public embarrassment. This has never been more true now that we've truly become a world of voyeurs and exhibitionists, actors and audiences. In effect, for libidinous and escapist politicians, life exposed on the Internet has become one big punchline.
To this mà ©lange of media missteps with a New York State of mind, we should add the implosion of Rupert Murdoch's mega-media conglomerate, News Corp (headquartered in the Big Apple) because of hackergate. Folks from a Fleet Street tabloid, News Corp's News of the World, allegedly hacked the phone messages of more than 4,000 people in England including hacking into and deleting messages from the voicemail of a 13-year-old girl who went missing and was later found murdered. This was remorselessly done in order to develop a sensational headline news story.
Debris from News Corp's implosion may soon to be washing onto American shores because News of the World's hacker victims allegedly also included 9/11 victims' relatives.
And, finally, now that the Pentagon has declared the Internet a "war domain"--aka war zone, all bets of net safety and privacy may be off, which must give us all pause. Will we be cyber-victims of scammers, journalists, political adversaries, or the CIA? To think, once we had to worry only about malware, viruses and other virtual bacteria.
Of course, all this is just the tip of an expanding iceberg, a media smorgasbord of unlimited possibilities that can't or won't stay under wraps for long, given the transparency and porousness of the internet and its motley ports of call. Who knows, we may all end up visiting or living in some virtual reality of one form or another, for some part of our complex, messy, 21st century lives. This could be our culture's collective Woody Allen movie, a Sleeper or Purple Rose of Cairo or Midnight in Paris; ah, Paris, where political or sexual scandals seem to go down the public throat more like a Brie than a very, very ripe French Munster.
This article was first Published on July 19, 2011 by Stuart Fischoff, Ph.D. in The Media Zone
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